Seek Out Queries That Already Use the Answer Box

If the competition’s doing a poor job, these are often easy to grab.
You want to seek out queries that already use the answer box. So again, if you’re using a tool like keyword explorer or something — I believe stat does this as well — where they will identify the types of results that are in the query. You’re looking for these answer box- or featured snippets-types of results. If they are in there and someone else already owns it, that means you can usually leapfrog them by providing a better-formatted, more accurate, more complete, or higher-ranking answer.

So if You’re Ranking Number Three or Number Four and

The number two or number one result is producing that answer box and you reformat your content (and I’ll talk about how we can do that in a sec), you reformat your content to meet one of these items, the correct one, whichever one is being triggered, you can Finance And Banking Email List leapfrog them. You can take that position zero away from your competition and earn it for yourself. It’s especially easy when they’re doing a poor job. If they’ve got a weak result in there, and there are a lot of these that are very weak today, you can often take them away.

3. Ranking #1 can help, but isn’t required

Google will pull from any first page result.
Ranking number one is helpful, but it is not DW Leads required. Google will pull from any first-page result. In fact, you can test this for yourself. Very frequently, if you do a query that pulls up an answer box and then you take the query string and you add “&num=100”.

4. Format and language are essential! Match the paragraph, or table, and use the logical answer to the query terms in your title/caption/label/section header.
Format and language. These are essential. The language means the language used. We need to use the terms and phrases a little more literally than we would with a lot of other types of keyword targeting, because google really, really seems to like, if I search for “Strengthen lower back,” they are showing me an article called “Strengthen lower back,” not “Back strengthening for newbies” or that kind of thing. They are much more literal in most of these than we’ve seen them be, thanks to technologies like rankbrain and hummingbird, with other kinds of queries.